Computer Science

The Thukrals wanted their son, Dhruv, to go into nanotechnology. So when he told them he'd rather be a video game developer he might as well have said he wanted to join the circus. "Are you serious?" they asked. He was. The 21-year-old USC graduate student proved it by switching the focus of his computer science doctorate from a field known as distributed systems to video game programming.

Retired IBM Corp. computer scientist Frances E. Allen, whose work helped crack Cold War-era code and predict the weather, today will be named the first woman to receive her profession's highest honor. The Assn. for Computing Machinery has granted the A.M. Turing Award for technical merit to no more than a few people each year since 1966.

With President Obama calling math and science education the key to good jobs in our future economy, Congress was told Wednesday that a pilot program in Los Angeles schools has started to show promising results in computer science.

Moving beyond fractals and skins, the online gallery www.complexification.net examines a new dimension in the relationship between computer science and fine art. Albuquerque-based computer programmer-artist-author Jared Tarbell, 31, designs computer programs to render intricate -- and seemingly infinite -- artwork.

Leonid Khachiyan, 52, a Rutgers University professor and a noted expert in computer science whose work helped computers process extremely complex problems, died Friday of a heart attack at his home in South Brunswick, N.J. In 1979, Khachiyan found an efficient way to solve programming problems that were thought to be intractable because they dealt with an often astronomically large number of options.

As the new school year approaches, our nation's computer hucksters will begin their annual promotion of technology in the classroom. Calls for wired schools have resulted in a fountain of money from telephone fees, bond issues and supplemental taxes. What pressing problems cause us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computers for schools? Are our students technological illiterates, afraid of the Internet? Are there not enough electronic messages in our children's lives?

In 1959, Fletcher Roseberry Jones, a marketing whiz, and Roy Nutt, a technical expert, quit their aerospace jobs, pooled together $100 in start-up capital and launched what would become a new industry. Nearly five decades later, Computer Sciences Corp. is one of the world's largest information technology firms, employing 78,000 people and generating $14 billion in annual revenue.

"The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me," Richard Ford, the novelist, wrote six years ago. It has only gotten worse since then, complains David M. Levy, a victim of information overload who is also a computer scientist at the University of Washington's Information School. Levy is all but helpless, he says, when new e-mail arrives. He feels obliged to open it. He is similarly hooked on the news, images and nonsense that spill out of the Internet.

Joel Edward Short, an innovator in computer networking and co-founder of a company that assists wireless service providers, died Nov. 21 in Los Angeles of undisclosed causes. He was 34. Fascinated by technology since childhood, Short earned a bachelor's degree at Cal State Chico and began his career in Silicon Valley working for Apple computers. He subsequently earned a doctorate in computer science at UCLA, where he worked closely with his professor, Internet pioneer Len Kleinrock.

Authorities filed federal charges against a 20-year-old student accused of hacking into a University of Texas computer system and stealing Social Security numbers and other personal data from more than 55,000 students, faculty and staffers. Christopher A. Phillips, who is studying computer science at the Austin campus, was charged with unlawful access to a protected computer and unlawful use of a means of identification.